With popularity of the mobile Internet, there is a higher probability that an Internet Protocol (IP) camera (IPC) video is demanded on a mobile terminal apparatus such as a mobile phone. However, subject to impact of undesirable stability of wireless networks and insufficient bandwidth, an unclear video image or even a frozen video image is very likely to occur, and playing of a video is not smooth. Therefore, how to play a video smoothly on an unstable wireless network with limited bandwidth is an urgent issue needed to be resolved.
In other approaches, a to-be-sent video is encoded to generate a full frame rate bitstream. When a network environment is good, the full frame rate bitstream is sent, and a frame rate for video sending is decreased quickly by means of frame dropping to adapt to the actual network environment when the network environment is poor. Further, when a poor network environment causes buffer overflow, an entire segment of video frames between a last frame of the buffer and a next instantaneous decoding refresh (IDR) frame is all dropped. When the next IDR frame arrives, whether buffer overflow remains is determined. If the buffer has free space, the IDR frame is not dropped and a subsequent frame is sent, and the IDR frame is dropped until a still next IDR frame arrives if the buffer is still in an overflow state. Such frame dropping manner is dropping a continuous segment of video frames all at a time. A quantity of video frames dropped in one frame dropping operation is large. As a result, long-time freezing of an image occurs, and the freezing is even severer after the IDR frame is dropped, which causes poor user experience.